... because we humans can only work for a world we can imagine.

Nick Pastalatzis
environmental activist and resident of Sunshine

as told to Merrill Findlay, 18 July 1996, and transcribed by Kirsty Wilson for Painting the future real, a community R&D project by ITF 1995-97

Key issues: air pollution, Asians, carbon tax, community languages, economics, education, employment/unemployment, environment movement, factory work, Greece, Greenhouse Effect, history, home ownership, immigration, industry restructuring, inequality, multiculturalism, nuclear industry, perceptions of the future, public transport, racism, renewable energy, road casualties, sustainability, uncertainty, uranium mining.

I'm twenty five years of age and I work as a kitchen-hand in one of the local hospitals. I'm also studying catering part-time at technical college. I was born in Australia but my parents come from Samos, an island in Greece. My Mum doesn't have very fond memories of her life in Greece and Dad doesn't talk about it much in my presence. As far as I understand, they came to Australia because they wanted a better life. They came here separately and married out here. I think it was sort of an arranged marriage, which I find quite hard to accept.

Right:Digital composite based on the Painting the future real interviews and created by Csaba Szamosy from images contributed by project partners, Imagine The Future Inc, 1996. One of the skins in ITF's re-interpreted possum skin cloak.

My Dad came to Australia first. He lived in Brunswick and moved around a lot, but then he got a job at the Massey Ferguson plant in Sunshine. I think he worked in the foundries, really old fashioned foundries where they had to mold things in sand. It sounds fairly dangerous. I remember he was injured when something fell on his boot once and burned through the leather, and he had to keep working. He hardly got any compensation for the burns. He worked there for at least eighteen years but he got sacked in 1983 when the factory was going through massive restructuring. He got a job then in another agricultural machinery factory in another part of Sunshine.

My mother used to work in a factory near Prahran as far as I know. She used to make cakes and puddings. I don't know how long she worked there before she had me. I'm her only child. She didn't speak English for a long time but eventually she picked it up. There were English classes for migrants at the Primary School I attended and she learned there. She also did a correspondence course and I think she was doing something at TAFE (Technical and Further Education) in Footscray and later at Collingwood. She speaks quite good English now but you can tell she's from overseas.

Nearly everyone in Sunshine had an overseas background when I was growing up and it's still like that. We've got Turkish people on one side of our house, and before them, there was someone from Argentina. When I was going to school a family from Germany lived in the other next door house. They moved out and the next family was from Portugal. The people who are there now are from India. There are also people from Cyprus, a couple of people from Malta and some Polish people in our street -- and a few born in Australia too I think. Most of them own their houses but there's one or two, possibly three houses I know of that are rented. But the main thing is that everyone's just trying to fit in .

Many people in Sunshine speak a second language but I only speak English now. I basically gave up on Greek when I went to kindergarten I think, because you were forced to forget your Greek and speak English then. I'm not ashamed of not speaking Greek, but then why should I be? There's nothing for me in Greece even though there's family there -- but they're only family on paper because there's nothing ... what can I say? The only word I can think of is 'spiritually'. Spiritually there's nothing there, nothing 'deep down' in my connection to Greece. Australia is where my spiritual connection is. This is where I'm going to stay, and there's no reason at this stage, for me to consider even visiting Greece.

ISSUES THAT CONCERN ME MOST

Right:Digital composite based on the Painting the future real interviews and created by Csaba Szamosy from images contributed by project partners, Imagine The Future Inc, 1996. One of the skins in ITF's re-interpreted possum skin cloak.

I don't understand what's happened to the West, but I know that when my parents moved here, Sunshine was a really important industrial centre with a lot of factories employing thousands of people. There are still a few factories producing sheet metal and stuff, but most of them have closed down and only the older people remember them. There used to be an ETA factory for example but I don't remember it. And Rothmans were out here somewhere. There were so many people working for Rothmans that they built an extra train station called Wide City. When the factory closed down the station closed down too because there were not enough people coming through. You can still see where there was a factory carpark of some sort. I don't know what happened to all those thousands of people who used to work there. I try to understand what's happened but I find some things, especially economic issues, right out of my league.

I'm concerned about the economy now for personal reasons, because the hospital kitchen where I work is probably coming under private contractors. At the moment they're tendering, but after a certain number weeks who knows if we're going to still have a job? Or even if we're going to have a public hospital? There's so much uncertainty and with unemployment being so high in the West now ... and unemployment is an issue that concerns everyone. I've been unemployed before. I was on the dole for six months and I hated it. I don't want to ever have to go back on the dole again. I think a job is important for most people because they want to buy their own homes and things. I don't know who ever dreamed up this Great Australian dream, or American Dream or whatever they call having your own house, but it's not my dream! Once people were able to work and save before they had kids, buy the house and pay it off. I remember when houses in Sunshine were around $32,000. Very cheap. So people paid their house off quickly. But now they're somewhere around $80,000 - $125,000 at least and up to $140,000. I'm single and not planning on getting married in the near future, but I don't believe a house is ever going to be within my grasp.

From what I've been reading, it seems we could provide more people with jobs by reducing the working week to 32 hours, cutting overtime, and employing others to do the work people do now as overtime. But I don't see that happening because the people who do the overtime wouldn't want to lose the money that's going into their pockets. But there are so many inequalities in the way we work. Some people are working full-time with low wages and some people are working part-time and are making more money than a full-timer. And then there are people who make $8 million a year! People talk about inequality but they're not prepared to put their arses on the line to really try to change anything .

To me, keeping kids at school a bit longer to give them a broader education would help. I think it's especially important to study history because you can learn from it. But if schools don't teach history then how can we? I learned a little bit of history when I was at high school but not a lot. I wish I'd learned more. And more about economics so I could understand what's happening to the economy now.

Another issue that concerns me in the West is public transport. There are train and bus services to Sunshine, but where I live there are no buses on Sundays and nothing past 7pm, even on week nights. There used to be some buses at night but with economic rationalism those services have been cut! At the moment the frequency of trains is around 20-25 minutes depending on where you are, but the Union says it's possible to get the frequency down to 15 minutes without changing anything much. With public transport the way it is people in Sunshine need to drive even to do their shopping. Near where I live there's a small strip of shops and you could walk to that, but if you wanted to go to Safeway then you'd need a car because of the distance and the amount of shopping you'd have to carry.

But there are also a lot of idiots with lead feet who want speed, speed, speed when they drive and I can kind of understand why. They want to live now, not in the future. They can't even see a future. But to me, what you do now affects the future -- and that's why public transport is important. Because it cuts down air pollution which contributes to the Greenhouse Effect by reducing the need for people to drive cars. It would also reduce the number of road casualties too. If you don't have so many people driving cars, you won't have so many people killing themselves on the roads. I have to admit that I have a car, but I do try to reduce the amount of time I use it.

Air pollution isn't just a western suburbs problem, it's a Melbourne problem. When you're going into the city on a clear blue-sky day, you can see a brownish black haze and it looks like a thin layer of cloud. But it's not cloud. A lot of it is car exhausts and a lot of that pollution could be reduced with a carbon tax, I think. We should also increase the amount of energy produced by wind, solar and micro-hydro electricity to reduce pollution more, especially Greenhouse gases.

I'm also very concerned about nuclear issues. I'm afraid of having a nuclear bomb dropped somewhere in the world and I'm afraid of the waste that the nuclear power industries generate. We even produce nuclear waste in Australia at Lucas Heights in Sydney. At the present I'm trying to help stop uranium mining in Australia so that we don't contribute to the nuclear industry. Last year I was helping out in the campaign against French nuclear testing in the Pacific. I was helping where I could and attending the emergency protests in the City Square but I was sort of getting discouraged by my mother. She'd say 'Why do you have to go? Can't you miss this one?' I tried to get people in Sunshine involved by letter-boxing but there aren't a lot people out here who want to get involved. They don't understand the issues because no-one's explained them to them in their own languages. The environmental movement shouldn't take people for granted like that. It has to print material in other languages so people can understand what's going on. You shouldn't expect everyone to understand English, especially in places like Sunshine.

Another issue I'm concerned about is racism. By the time I started high school a lot of the racism had subsided. People who were at school earlier than me experienced a lot of racism, but by the time I got there people from non-English speaking backgrounds outnumbered Anglo-Australians. But you'd hear stories from the Anglos that if you married some-one from an ethnic background your kids would be uglier than if you married some-one from an 'Australian' background. Vietnamese people suffered more racism than people like me from a Greek background -- because they are the most recent immigrants.

Some people are against immigration altogether and they were the ones who called us 'wogs'. Some of them said one solution was for the 'wogs' that are here to stay here, but don't let any more into the country. These people are especially against Asian immigration . They see Asians driving a shit-bomb of a car and then a few weeks later, they get a brand new one, so they think that the government is giving them handouts or something. One of the explanations I heard was a story about people arriving here with diamonds stuck up parts of their anatomy, and selling them once they're settled. But people might also just work and save very hard for a deposit on a new car.

MY VISION OF THE FUTURE

Right:Digital composite based on the Painting the future real interviews and created by Csaba Szamosy from images contributed by project partners, Imagine The Future Inc, 1996. One of the skins in ITF's re-interpreted possum skin cloak.

When I think about the future, I see less cars and all our energy produced from renewables so we have less impact on the environment. I'd like there to be some sort of guarantee that there will be a job out there, but not the sort of guarantee that a job is for a life time. I just don't want to see people being afraid of unemployment. I want people to listen to each other, to be prepared to try a few different things, be prepared to change and learn how to cope with change better. I want to see people prepared to learn, because some people in society, they don't want to learn from their history. Some people can't even handle reading books, even though they can read. And I want to see less disease and more prevention of disease -- but not by having drug companies trying to make profit out of disease. I want to see less lung cancer caused by smoking, and use less use of chemicals. I want to see people living in ways that don't depend on the use of chemicals.

But for me, the most important thing about thinking about a sustainable future, is that there will be a future. That's what I'm saying, that there will be a future! And it could be really good. But people need to be prepared to listen to new ideas and to take a few risks to see if the ideas work or not. We need to experiment.

Nick Pastalatzis
Sunshine
Protected by copyright, 1996

[Page history: created and first published on www.ecoversity.org.au as part of Painting the future real (1995-97), the prototype for Redreaming the plain (1998-2002); taken off-line in 1998 and re-posted in a slightly modified form in July 2004 as a web archive. For more information contact redreaming@rmit.edu.au.]